“Make sure the place is watched every fucking day,” I say as I shove the crib into the corner of the room. I adjust the phone in the crook of my neck. “And if Aunt Sona shows her face, call me so I can cut her throat.”
“I have eyes on it,” Tigran says in my ear. “What’s that noise? You moving furniture around or something?”
“Nursery,” I grumble, stepping back to inspect my work. “Also, there’s a shipment of guns coming in from the Russians. Make sure that goes well.”
“Are you talking about killing your own aunt and doing an arms deal while building your baby’s room?”
“It’s fucking business.” I clench my jaw and heft a pack of diapers. “Do you have any idea how expensive all this shit is?”
“Not like you actually care.”
“Just madness. Not all families have my resources.”
“Wow, you truly have become a social revolutionary. I’ll take care of the guns.”
“Thanks, brother.”
We get off the phone. The nursery is coming along bit by bit. I’ve been buying as much as I can and stocking up on all the essentials, but no matter how many tubes of cream or packages of overnight pads I get, it never feels like enough.
Lena says I’m overthinking it. But I worry she’s underthinking it. Our child is coming in only a few months, and by the time the baby’s here, it’ll be too late. I want to make sure we have everything we could possibly need and more.
There’s a stack of baby books beside our bed, but she hasn’t touched any.
Meanwhile, I’ve torn through them all.
I can’t help myself. I’m the kind of man that has to prepare and plan.
While she’s wandering around with her brain in the damn clouds.
“Lena?” I call out, poking my head into the hall. But my wife is nowhere to be seen. I grumble to myself and start searching the house for her. I can’t find her anywhere, at least until Maud says she was spotted heading into the basement.
The stairs creak under my weight as I descend. It smells slightly damp despite the dehumidifier. I haven’t bothered finishing it yet, but I suspect that’s on our list of renovations once we start filling this place with children.
How many children, exactly? I’m not sure, but it’s going to be more than a few.
Just have to convince my wife that’s a good idea first.
“Lena?” I call out.
“In here!” Her voice is muffled, but it’s coming from the back room.
I head over, batting away spider webs. “Where are you?”
“Here.” Some shuffling sounds come from inside the damn crawlspace. It’s a narrow storage area that extends nearly fifty feet in pure darkness. We keep my fucking skis in there.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask, raising my phone and hitting the flashlight.
I find her looking at me sheepishly. She’s curled on her side halfway down in the pitch darkness. “Exploring?”
“Get out of there, you madwoman,” I say, reaching for her ankle.
She kicks me away. “I was curious! I saw some stuff inside so I started shimmying in, and then—” She grins a little. “I got kind of stuck.”
I groan and curse at her in Armenian. I have to force myself in after her and manage to unhook her belt loop of her jeans from where it got caught on a loose flooring nail. We slither out together and spend a few seconds brushing dust and dirt from our hair and off our clothes.
This isn’t what I pictured when I imagined marriage: two filthy people knocking mouse droppings from their shoes.
“You can’t keep doing stuff like this,” I say, scolding her as we head back upstairs. “That was dangerous.”
“It’s no big deal,” she says, waving me off. “I knew you’d find me. Eventually. Probably.”
“Fuck, woman, you can’t do that. You’re pregnant with my child! I was upstairs working on the nursery—”
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
“If you get in trouble, you’re not just risking yourself.”
She glares at me defiantly. “I thought you liked it when I got all curious?”
“I like that it’s a part of your personality, but you can’t go getting yourself trapped in crawlspaces!”
“It’s not like I set out to get stuck on purpose.” She storms past me and stomps upstairs. I follow her into our bedroom.
“At least wait until after the baby’s born before you start cave diving.”
“I wasn’t cave diving. I was just looking around in my own house, that’s all.” She arches her eyebrows, arms crossed over her chest. “Or do you have more skeletons down there you don’t want me to find?”
I groan and look at the ceiling. “You know this isn’t about that.”
“I get it,” she says, spreading her hands. “It was reckless, okay? I shouldn’t have been crawling around there in the dark. But I was poking my head around earlier and I just couldn’t help myself.”
I rub my temples. It’s bad enough running a fractured and warring Brotherhood. But now I have a crazy wife with an exploration obsession, and I’m afraid one of these days she’s going to get herself killed.
How am I supposed to explain that to my people? Sorry, brothers, my wife starved to death when she got herself trapped in the crawlspace.
“I want you to be yourself. I really do. I just also want to make sure my child is born and my wife survives until we die clutching each other of old age.”
“Aw, you want to die holding each other?”
“Buried in the same grave for all eternity.”
“Bleak. Weird. I like it.”
“Good. Come here.” I pull her against me and kiss her softly. “Want to see what I’ve done in the nursery?”
“Only if it means this fight is over.”
My eyebrows raise. “We’re fighting?”
“I thought we were.”
“No, baby, this isn’t a fight. When we’re fighting, there will be vicious and filthy make-up sex afterward.”
She pouts slightly. “You’re saying you’re not going to fuck me into submission until I say sorry?”
I snarl slightly and bite her lower lip. “After you look at the nursery.”
“What a tease.”
She laughs as I show her the crib and all the supplies. We talk about the coming baby and about the OB she’s been seeing. Things are good with her physically, and I’m looking forward to the first ultrasounds.
I just worry about her. There are only two weeks left in my one-month deadline. I want to spend as much time with her as possible, but I also need to focus on this war and finishing Sona and Garen before the clock runs out.
“I know you’re stressed,” she says an hour later in the bed after we have the promised sweaty sex. “I’ll behave. Really, I mean it.”
I bite her thigh and pat her little butt before squeezing it. “You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m serious!”
“Come on, baby. You like pushing boundaries. You like crossing lines. You’re going to get yourself in trouble tomorrow just so I’ll be forced to fuck your pretty mouth yet again.”
“I do like that,” she says with a sigh and stretches.
I kiss her shoulders and lean against her back. “Then don’t pretend.”
“But I want this to work.” She’s speaking softly, and it’s the first time I’ve heard her say something like this. “I don’t want to just co-parent together. I want to raise this child. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think I do.”
“I want to do it together. Like a normal family.” She chews her lip. “But we’re not really normal, are we?”
“I don’t believe in normal as a concept. Everyone’s strange in their own way.”
“But we’re extra strange.”
“Good. Strange makes for interesting people.” I roughly pull her against me. “Where’s this coming from?”
“Just something I’ve been thinking about.”
“We’re doing this together. I promise, baby. Me and you.”
“Husband and wife?”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah, okay.” She whimpers when I kiss her again. “I’ll stay out of the crawlspace. For a while, anyway.”
“That’s my good girl.”
“Now, what do I have to do to earn another one of those punishments?”
